Sports: ‘The Grind,’ ‘Billion-Dollar Ball’ and More

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CreditCreditJoão Fazenda

By Ihsan Taylor

Nov. 30, 2015

I can’t swim. I can’t dribble a basketball without staring at it, severely compromising my mobility. And I’ve never raised my voice to a stranger, let alone my fists. In sum, I’m not an athlete. But these facts only deepen my admiration for those who are. It’s why I love sports, and the exhilarating, joyously cliché-ridden prose it inspires.

It’s not a notion that’ll win over skeptics, but “the grind” — the relentless rhythms and tiny disruptions of a season, from spring training to the Fall Classic — is actually one of baseball’s charms. In THE GRIND: Inside Baseball’s Endless Season (Blue Rider, $23.95), Barry Svrluga, a Washington Post sportswriter, captures the little-seen aspects of the hometown Nationals’ 2014 season: struggling star players and ever-hopeful minor leaguers, front-office executives and equipment managers, apprehensive wives and road-weary scouts.

Svrluga’s portrayals include Ryan Zimmerman, a.k.a. the Veteran, who’s rebuilding his body — and its surgically repaired parts — in preparation for the season ahead. (“All you can do is try to maintain,” he tells Svrluga one winter morning, “and survive.”) There’s Tyler Moore, the 26th Man, a Triple-A ballplayer who has served several stints in the majors, whenever there’s a shake-up to the Nationals’ 25-man roster, only to be sent back down. But like everyone else in “The Grind,” he’s undaunted, ready, Svrluga says, “for his next phone call, his next flight to meet the major league team, putting disappointment and frustration in a box somewhere, lid shut tight.” The best parts of “The Grind” are both intimate and expansive; in Svrluga’s telling, spring training in Viera, Fla., and a late-game at-bat in Pawtucket, R.I., weigh as heavily as the goings-on at Nationals Park.

Contrary to its title, “The Grind” is a brisk work — it can be read during a nine-inning game — but Svrluga’s vignettes are no less affecting for their brevity. On the field, the Nationals’ 2014 season fizzled with a playoff loss to the San Francisco Giants. But in “The Grind,” the attention quickly turns to 2015; there are player contracts to negotiate, families to attend to, and the equipment trucks will soon be leaving again for Florida.

Baseball seasons churn on, but I suspect players rarely, if ever, achieve the “Zen-like state of instinctual action” sought by the world’s elite distance runners in Ed Caesar’s TWO HOURS: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon (Simon & Schuster, $26). Physiology matters too, of course, and so do geography and technology, and Caesar explores the lives, training routines and ancestry of today’s greatest marathoners, nearly all of them East Africans.

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Geoffrey Mutai of Kenya wins the men’s division of the New York City Marathon, 2013.CreditKathy Willens/Associated Press

More specifically, they’re Kenyans, men and women from the highlands at the western edge of the Rift Valley. (It’s hard to overstate running’s cultural importance in Kenya; think shortstops in the Dominican Republic, or point guards in New York City.) It’s the homeland of the great Geoffrey Mutai — “a rich man who grew up without shoes” — and Caesar closely follows Mutai’s push to improve on his already eye-popping marathon times.

Caesar takes a wide look at the history of the mara­thon and its emergence as an Olympics mainstay at the turn of the 20th century. By his estimate, there are now more than 500 marathons worldwide, including an unofficial circuit of big-money races. But the book pivots on this much-debated question: What will it take to run 26.2 miles in two hours? It is “the sport’s Everest.” Caesar cites the physiologist Michael Joyner, who, in an influential 1991 paper, tried to calculate the fastest possible marathon time and settled on 1:57:58. Granted, there are those who say the two-hour marathon is beyond reach, but the same was said of the four-­minute mile before Roger Bannister in Oxford in 1954. The current record — 2:02:57, set in Berlin in 2014 by Dennis Kimetto, a Kenyan — is almost five minutes short of Joyner’s prediction, but it’s nearly four minutes faster than the world’s fastest marathon was in 1991.

Caesar, a war correspondent who has reported from Africa, Iran and Kosovo, can amusingly sketch the marathon’s “creation myth” (the heroic tale of the Greek messenger Pheidippides in 490 B.C., he says, “was bunk”), then switch gears and discuss the science of lung and leg capacity and the thorny matter of doping with analytical rigor. There’s beautiful imagery here, too: a training group’s predawn run in the dusty lanes of the Rift Valley, 50 or 60 Kenyans arranged in single files with the sky “still black and buckshot with stars”; Geoffrey Mutai pulling away from the lead pack — to say nothing of the more than 50,000 other participants — to win the 2013 New York City Marathon (“It was just him, alone, on Fifth Avenue. He had become the workings of his own body”).

Diana Nyad, a champion swimmer turned television personality and radio commentator, also challenges boundaries. The climax of FIND A WAY (Knopf, $26.95) is her historic swim from Havana to Key West, Fla., in 2013. That Nyad conquered the 110-mile passage, without a shark cage, in just under 53 hours is remarkable enough; that she did it at the age of 64 — after 35 years and four failed attempts — is awe-inspiring, a testament to her physical prowess and indomitable spirit. (Nyad wrote a previous memoir, “Other Shores,” in 1978, and was the subject of a 2013 documentary by her nephew.)

Huddled with her 35-member support team on a Havana dock shortly before an unsuccessful crossing, in 2011, Nyad recalls: “The chanting begins in a gentle chorus and grows to an adrenaline-fueled frenzy. . . . We are giddy with faith.” That’s a good way to describe this relentlessly life-affirming book; the Cuba-Florida swim is the latest, greatest chapter in Nyad’s story of perseverance and personal triumph. Sexually abused in childhood — first by her con artist stepfather, then by her school’s swim coach — Nyad found refuge in her laser-focused training: “I might have been broken internally, but externally I was tough and strong.”

Competitive long-distance swimming became Nyad’s way of pushing her body to its physical limits. In 1978, she tried her first Cuba-Florida crossing (fittingly, she calls it an expedition; more familiarly, it’s “the Mount Everest of ocean swimming”). But a squall pushes her hopelessly off course. (This is but one risk; hyperthermia and hypothermia are also possibilities, and in addition to the menace of sharks, there’s the unpredictable Gulf Stream and clusters of venomous box jellyfish, whose stings forced Nyad to cut short her third attempt, in 2011.)

Three decades later, Nyad, in her 60s, revived the old dream. There’s a touch of repetitiveness to some of the details. Training regimens are followed, governmental permits are secured, a nautical crew springs into action. But periodically Nyad catches us up on outside events. She became a broadcaster on “Wide World of Sports” and a commentator for NPR. And in several brief chapters, Nyad reflects on other turning points — breaking up with the love of her life, her mother’s decline into Alzheimer’s — draws lessons and strength from them, and then symbolically closes the door.

“Find a Way” is frankly and openly a story about refusing to accept, or be defined by, defeat. After Nyad’s fourth and last failed Cuba-Florida crossing, she proclaims, “I’m either a stubborn fool, obsessed with an irrational, quixotic Dream, or I’m a valiant warrior who will not let my faith be broken.”

In October, a crisp Saturday wilted a little when my beloved Michigan lost to rival Michigan State on the game’s final play, a frantic 10 seconds that may go down as the most thrilling of the 2015 college football season. But Gilbert M. Gaul, in his incisive BILLION-DOLLAR BALL: A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football (Viking, $27.95), compels us to see something more: a money­making spectacle that “has challenged the notion of universities as places of learning and reflection.”

Gaul, a two-time Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist, casts a sober eye on the economic landscape of college football — the tax breaks, television deals and corporate sponsorships that create staggering revenues for powerhouse programs. In one recent year, 10 of the largest football programs took in nearly $800 million — “hedge-fund level” windfalls, Gaul observes acerbically, little of which is passed on to the universities themselves. It’s a system, Gaul notes, that works only for the “haves” like Michigan, Texas and others in the so-called Big 5 conferences (the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pacific-12, and the Southeastern and Atlantic Coast Conferences). He cites the stinging example of Florida Atlantic University, a “have-not” football program that takes its lumps on the field, before a half-empty stadium at home, while losing, Gaul estimates, millions of dollars each year.

For much of the book, Gaul comes across like a bemused accountant trying to make sense of these absurd numbers. But occasionally, he’s more of a modern-day Twain, visiting college campuses and asking all sorts of people all sorts of questions. He finds encouraging stories at the University of Mount Union, an N.C.A.A. Division III program in northeast Ohio, where football “still functioned the way college sports were supposed to before they became a commodity and a brand”; and in the women’s rowing teams at Kansas State and Wisconsin. (A byproduct of the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX, women’s rowing is the N.C.A.A.’s “most democratic sport,” Gaul suggests.)

“Billion-Dollar Ball” doesn’t pack the visceral gut-punch of recent books focusing on, say, football’s brutality and player safety. But it confronts fans of college football with a side of the game — the business side — that’s every bit as mercenary. Clearly, college football is no longer just a game.

At the pinnacle of the college football world is Alabama’s unsmiling, unsparing Nick Saban. In his 20 years as a college head coach, he’s won four national championships — one with Louisiana State and three in the past six seasons with the Crimson Tide. (The chancellor of the University of Alabama System once declared him “the best financial investment this university has ever made.”) Not surprisingly, there’s an enigmatic, polarizing personality behind all this success, which Monte Burke diligently pieces together in SABAN: The Making of a Coach (Simon & Schuster, $27).

Burke, a contributing editor at Forbes, traces Saban’s almost pathological drive to a coal-mining satellite town in West Virginia, where Saban, an only son, lived to please “Big” Nick Saban, an intimidating figure who managed to avoid a life in the mines. (Saban played to please Big Nick, too: When he wasn’t washing cars at Saban’s Service Station in the early 1960s, he quarterbacked Big Nick’s renowned Pop Warner team.) For young Nick Saban, satisfaction was derived from the quest for perfection, not perfection itself — a theme Burke revisits each time Saban arrives at a professional crossroads. (Burke and other journalists call it “the itch.”)

Even by today’s coaching standards, Saban’s career has been nomadic: assistant positions at Kent State, Syracuse, West Virginia, Ohio State, Navy and Michigan State, and in the National Football League; head jobs at Toledo, Michigan State, L.S.U. and Alabama, and a forgettable two years with the Miami Dolphins. The victories pile up, and Saban’s reputation and earning power grow, too; in 2013, Alabama rewarded him with a new $6.9 million annual contract. But there are also stories of a man whose single-mindedness can seem almost tyrannical. Burke recounts a favorite story among Saban’s detractors: While coaching the Dolphins, he reportedly once stepped over a convulsing player after practice without acknowledging his presence.

“Saban” isn’t an authorized biography, but Burke’s array of sources — friends, colleagues, rivals, former players — makes it feel definitive. There’s little on-the-field action here; even during Saban’s career-defining games, Burke’s focus is steadfastly on the sidelines. But our understanding of Nick Saban, the man and the coach, is better for it.

“Basketball itself didn’t take up residence in the White House in January 2009,” Alexander Wolff writes in THE AUDACITY OF HOOP: Basketball and the Age of Obama (Temple University, $40), a mosaic of “biographical sketch, political narrative and cultural history.” But, he adds, “the game nonetheless played an outsized role in forming the man who did.” Adapted from a 2009 essay in Sports Illustrated (Wolff is a senior writer at the magazine), this book-length effort is fuller, richer in scope with the benefit of six more years of hindsight, and it’s illustrated with a time capsule’s worth of pictures, many of them by the longtime White House photographer Pete Souza.

Wolff examines Barack Obama in the light of basketball, which proves to be a surprisingly effective, and malleable, metaphor. He compares pickup games and political consensus building, and credits the game with undermining Republican efforts to portray Obama as “foreign, suspicious” during the 2008 presidential campaign. Under Wolff’s lens, the president’s swagger and mental toughness, his ability to improvise and connect, evolved from lessons learned on the hardcourt.

An older image is one of the book’s most resonant: 10-year-old Barack Obama and his Kenyan father in Hawaii, December 1971. Barack Sr. gives his son a basketball for Christmas, and we’re told it’s the last time they’ll see each other. The basketball, and the game it represents, “provided space for young Barry Obama to explore his identity,” Wolff writes. Obama himself referred to this in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” as “a fitful interior struggle . . . to raise myself to be a black man in America.”

There’s an improvisational feel to “The Audacity of Hoop,” with sidebars, a timeline and profiles of other ballers in “the White House orbit.” What unifies it all are the evocative photographs: Obama, on the South Lawn or on Chicago’s South Side, in solitude or challenging White House aides for a rebound. They’re more sublime than splashy — proof that, even as Obama follows his presidential forebears to the first tee, it’s basketball that made him, in the words of Ishmael Reed, “the president of the Cool.”

Mixed martial arts — the combat sport combining elements of wrestling, boxing, Brazilian jujitsu and kickboxing — has been elbowing its way into the mainstream for years, but I still balk at its brutality. Doug Merlino hasn’t made a convert out of me, but, like any gifted writer, he’s got me thinking seriously about the history, culture and business of professional cage fighting, and about the four aspiring combatants at the center of his book BEAST: Blood, Struggle, and Dreams at the Heart of Mixed Martial Arts (Bloomsbury, $26): a young Bosnian refugee; a battered anarchist in his 40s enjoying a late burst of popularity in Russia; a former Olympic wrestler; and an ex-convict clawing his way up toward title contention.

“Beast” offers a useful primer on M.M.A.’s evolution. For his part, Merlino was hooked the first time he saw an M.M.A. bout on television. “It was aggressive, violent,” he recalls, “an unrepentant celebration of what some would call regressive masculinity.” (Indeed, in its outlaw years, Senator John McCain derided it as “human cockfighting.”) For two years, he not only follows the four fighters as their fortunes rise and fall, he trains alongside them at a top gym in Florida.

At fight time, Merlino spares us none of the carnage inside the cage, and, judging by his descriptions of the bloodthirsty crowds at regional shows — a small-time bout in Peoria, Ill., includes a weigh-in at a strip club — M.M.A. enthusiasts wouldn’t want it any other way: “Skelly reached down to hold Bektic’s head in place and aimed his knee into his temple.” Time out.

Equally intriguing are Merlino’s portrayals of Ultimate Fighting Championship, the company that has made mixed martial arts a commercial success; its carnival barker president, Dana White; and its recently dethroned bantamweight, Ronda Rousey, who has become the U.F.C.’s dominant personality. Merlino maintains a nifty balancing act throughout “Beast,” keeping an objective, critical distance from the sport’s culture — there’s more than a whiff of professional wrestling shtick — while becoming absorbed in the lives of its gladiators. His narrative tone is more often philosophical than raucous. “This was M.M.A.,” Merlino says of the scene in a Las Vegas convention hall during an annual U.F.C. Fan Expo. “A thousand hustles. At the heart of it all was the fight, the will to excel, to rise, to be something.”

Only a precious few, those at the top ranks of M.M.A., earn an enviable living. Fears of injury? Merlino’s four fighters are aware of the risks and press on, desperately, each for his own reasons. In the end, it’s their will to excel, to be something, that made me root for them to confront their fears and uncertainty and get back up each time they were knocked down.